1 Product
I just launched a new project that anyone interested in product ideas might find useful.
One use case of the Product Explorer is to find abandoned projects you can revive. There are many ideas that once got a lot of attention but then fizzled out. If you launch a similar idea, chances are high that it also will get a lot of attention.
But you can also use the database to discover all the projects that launched successfully with a similar idea. I personally used this, for example, to find a good tagline for my Product Hunt launch.
1 Prompt
What is a popular type of side-hustle that’s currently becoming more popular? What could you create to help these side-hustlers?
(My favorite example that used this strategy is Closet Tools which makes it easier for people to sell their clothes on Poshmark and currently makes $38,000 per month.)
2 Opportunities
There is a huge opportunity to create physical-products-on-demand services. Examples that already exist and are thriving are books-on-demand (e.g. Amazon KDP), magazines-on-demand (e.g. Smartpress) and t-shirts (e.g. Merch by Amazon).
But there are so many types of products that are still not available on an on-demand basis. Moreover, basically all niches are unexplored. There are currently just a few large players that don’t care about more specialized demands.
A perfect example of a company that’s taking advantage of this is Pup Socks. They’ve specialized on printing pictures of pets onto socks. The production costs per pair are certainly below $5 and they’re selling them for $25.
One type of product where currently no good on-demand service exists is cards. There are lots of creative, niche use cases as demonstrated by Office Hour Cards and Disrupt Cards. However, these companies had to order large batches of cards which is an unnecessarily large risks that shouldn’t exist in today’s on-demand economy.
As people spend more and more time alone due to Covid 19, interest in personal productivity is skyrocketing. A great example is that Nat Eliason made hundreds of thousands of dollars with a course that explains how to use a note-taking tool. (Of course, he also used the well-known strategy to jump on hypetrains.) Tiago Forte and David Perell have been even more successful with their courses that target a similar niche.
1 Thought
“Leonardo da Vinci used to throw paint filled sponges at walls and then force himself to make sense out of the resulting irregular shapes in relation to a problem he was interested in. For example: he might be thinking about transportation and say "well this looks like a horse drawing a carriage ..." and then use it as a basis to come up with new ideas. By forcing his brain to make connections between totally unrelated things it enhanced his creativity (or at least that was the intention.) “ - Uptrende on Hacker News